In 2010, Kalief Browder was, by all accounts, a healthy, ordinary 16-year-old black teenager living in New York City. On June 6, he took his own life. On Thursday, 12 days later, a Supreme Court justice took notice.

Browder spent three years in Rikers Island without trial for allegedly stealing a backpack. For two of those years, he was kept in “administrative segregation,” more commonly known as solitary confinement. He was subsequently released without ever being charged or tried for the alleged crime. Browder received national attention after The New Yorkerreported on his story in October 2014. With the help of an anonymous benefactor, he enrolled in community college and tried to rebuild, but struggled with psychiatric issues he attributed to his isolation. He was 22 years old when he died. Politicians ranging from Mayor Bill de Blasio to Senator Rand Paul cited his case in the broader national discussion on criminal-justice reform.

Now, so has Justice Anthony Kennedy. In a powerful five-page concurrence in Davis v. Ayala, Kennedy criticized the widespread use of solitary confinement in American prisons, which he said affected at least 25,000 inmates in the United States. Among them was Browder, whom Kennedy directly invoked. His evidence ranged from the 1890 case In re Medley, in which the Court acknowledged that solitary confinement can lead to madness and suicide, to modern studies by psychologists and penologists. He cited a litany of possible side effects to prolonged isolation, including anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hallucinations, and self-mutilation.

“Research still confirms what this Court suggested over a century ago: Years on end of near-total isolation exacts a terrible price,” he summarized.

Kennedy’s critique of solitary confinement in Davis came without warning or fanfare. Davis was not a case about solitary confinement at all; the Court had accepted it to address peremptory challenges during jury selection. But the length and condition of Ayala’s imprisonment appears to have caught Kennedy’s attention. Towards the end of oral arguments on March 3, he briefly quizzed Anthony Dain, Ayala’s lawyer, for more details.

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“This crime was, what, 30 years ago and the trial [was] 26 years ago? Has he spent time in solitary confinement, and if so, how much?” Kennedy asked.

“He has spent his entire time in what’s called administrative segregation. When I visit him, I visit him through glass and wire bars,” Dain replied. When the justice inquired about the difference between solitary confinement and administrative segregation, Dain said his client spent 23 hours in his cell and was allowed one hour of activity.

“One hour,” Kennedy muttered in response as Dain’s time expired.

Solitary confinement is a new battleground for the Court’s second-longest serving justice, but not a surprising one. Few justices on the Supreme Court have wielded the Eighth Amendment as expansively as Anthony Kennedy. On the death penalty, he wrote the majority opinions in Roper v. Simmons, which forbade the execution of juvenile offenders, and Kennedy v. Louisiana, which struck down death sentences for non-homicide crimes. In 2011, he joined with the Court’s liberal wing in Brown v. Plata to uphold a landmark federal-court order requiring California to reduce prison overcrowding. Kennedy also provided the fifth vote in Miller v. Alabama, in which the Court struck down mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles in 2012. As the court’s swing vote, he carries tremendous power to shape cases to form majorities.

Although Kennedy addressed solitary confinement specifically, he also invoked mass incarceration in general and the national debate surrounding it. “There are indications of a new and growing awareness in the broader public of the subject of corrections and of solitary confinement in particular,” he noted. Perhaps hoping to reach this broader public, Kennedy wrote without dense legal jargon and cited examples ranging from Kalief Browder to Dr. Manette, the imprisoned father of Lucie in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. “Even Manette, while imprisoned, had a work bench and tools to make shoes, a type of diversion no doubt denied many of today’s inmates,” he observed.

But Kennedy’s concurrence also seemed to be directed toward the American legal community, whose disengagement from prison issues he has previously lamented. “In law school, I never heard about corrections,” he told a congressional hearing on March 23, two weeks after the Davis oral arguments. “Lawyers are fascinated with the guilt/innocence adjudication process. Once [it] is over, we have no interest in corrections. Doctors and psychiatrists know more about the corrections system than we do.”

Although no one realized it at the time, his brief soliloquy on the crisis of “total incarceration” in March was a preview of today’s concurrence. “Too often, discussion in the legal academy and among practitioners concentrates simply on the adjudication of guilt or innocence,” Kennedy wrote. “Too easily ignored is the question is the question of what comes next. Prisoners are shut away—out of sight, out of mind.” Consideration of these issues, he stated, “is needed.”

To that end, Kennedy all but urged the legal community to bring a solitary-confinement case before the Supreme Court as soon as possible. With the proper case, he wrote, “the judiciary may be required, within its proper jurisdiction and authority, to determine whether workable alternative systems for long-term incarceration exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.”

If the other members of the Court share Kennedy’s viewpoint, they did not disclose it. None of the other justices joined his concurrence, and only Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged it at all. In a one-paragraph response, Thomas evoked the memory of Ayala’s three victims to dismiss Kennedy’s critiques. “I write separately only to point out ... that the accommodations in which Ayala is housed are a far sight more spacious than those in which [his victims] now rest,” he wrote. “And, given that his victims were all 31 years of age or younger, Ayala will soon have had as much or more time to enjoy those accommodations as his victims had time to enjoy this Earth.”

But for Kennedy, the problems with solitary confinement went far beyond any one case, including this one. “Over 150 years ago, Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,’” the justice concluded. “There is truth to this in our own time.”

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A new survey suggests many might prefer a kind of multipolar Washington, with three distinct orbits of power checking each other.

Does Donald Trump have a mandate?

Though last month’s election provided Trump and his fellow Republicans unified control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate for the first time since 2006, the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll shows the country remains closely split on many of the key policy challenges facing the incoming administration—and sharply divided on whether they trust the next president to take the lead in responding to them.

In addition, on several important choices facing the new administration and Congress, the survey found that respondents who voted for Trump supported a position that was rejected by the majority of adults overall. That contrast may simultaneously encourage Trump to press forward on an agenda that energizes his coalition, while emboldening congressional Democrats to resist him.